Eclipse Modeling: Models Getting Bigger

If you take a look at the more recent activities at Eclipse Modeling you can clearly see a focus on scalability, teamwork, and big or many models.

CDO, the database-based persistence and collaboration layer for EMF models has been extremely popular at this year's Eclipse Summit. I heard about several projects that consider using CDO as the backend for an enterprise wide modeling infrastructure.

What's currently is still missing in EMF (and to some extent also in CDO) is a flexible and scalable query facility. A query language is needed and EMF resources need to provide an API against which queries can be executed. The model query project, spearheaded by SAP, aims at providing this.

In the file/text based environment scalability is also an issue. Modern IDE is, for example, build an index of symbols and the resources in which they're defined to support efficient linking and lookup. The EMF index project, led by the itemis folks in Kiel provides this capability specifically for use by Xtext.

Finally, the ARTOP project has created a number of facilities to work with EMF/XMI models that are several hundred megabytes in size (the tools are not publicly available right now).

All of these projects and developments are a clear signal that Eclipse modeling is picking up momentum in "real" environments. It is a good sign if a technology leaves behind the "it works" phase and addresses "how to use it large scale".  permalink